POTF 23 - Nominations

[Lord Thesaurian]

POTF is about recognising the very best posts, the best arguments and discourse in the D&D, and appropriately rewarding it.


You shall progressively earn these medals once you achieve enough wins, but first you must be nominated in threads such as this one. And it works like this.

Post of the Fortnight - Rules

-Each user can nominate up to 2 posts per round, and the only valid form of nomination is by quoting with a link as shown below the chosen post in the PotF thread designated for it.

Looking forward to getting this kicked off for real!

-Each 15 days there will be a new Nomination thread put up, and all the posts written during this period are considered eligible, if properly nominated. Exception are posts who are somewhat breaking the ToS; upon being acted by Moderation, they are always considered uneligible.


- Remember: It is possible to nominate up to 2 posts each round of the competition; it is also possible to change a nomination anytime before the actual round of nominations ends.


- There will be two competitions held every month, with a period for nominations followed by a period of voting. The submitted posts can be discussed in a dedicated space.


- Only posts that have not participated in a previous poll and that have been published in the current period of given time in any section of the D&D area may be nominated.


- The authors of the nominated post will be informed so they can withdraw the candidacy if that is their wish.


- The maximum number of participating posts in the final vote will be ten. If more than ten nominations are submitted, seconded nominations will take priority. After seconded nominations are considered, earliest nominations will take priority. If the number of posts submitted to the contest is less than ten, the organizing committee may nominate posts if it considers it appropriate.


-The members of the committee will never nominate a post belonging to one of them, but the rest of the users can nominate their posts (organizers posts), and vice versa.


-In the event of a tie, both posts will be awarded and both posters will receive rep and 1 competition point.


- Public or private messages asking for a vote for a candidate post are forbidden. Violators (and their posts) may not participate in the running contest.


- People are expected to consider the quality and structure of the post itself, more than the content of the same. While it's certainly impossible to completely split the two aspects when making our own opinion on a post, it remains intended, as also explained in the Competition Commentary Thread, that commenting and discussing on the content rather than on the form/structure of the post is considered off-topic for the purpose of this competition. You are free to nominate and vote for whatever reason you want, but what happens in public has to strictly follow up with the competition rules.


A nominated post should:


1. Be focused and relevant to the topic(s) being discussed.
2. Demonstrate a well-developed, insightful and nuanced understanding of the topic(s) it is discussing.
3. Be logically coherent, well organized and communicate its points effectively.
4. Support its contentions with verifiable evidence, either in the form of links or references.
5. Not be deliberately vexatious to other users.

[Lord Thesaurian]

The press coverage is a bit misleading. Being the earliest extant structure doesn’t necessarily make it the earliest carpentry or even the earliest structure of its kind. The issue may be mostly one of preservation. According to dendrochronology, the wood in this structure dates to 5256/55 BCE. The carved wooden Shigir Idol dates to about 9500 BCE. The Pesse canoe was constructed sometime between 8040 BCE and 7510 BCE. Both would have long since decomposed if they hadn't ended up in peat bogs.

The dating of this well coincides with the arrival of Neolithic people in the area. There have been two wooden wells found in Hungary (Tiszakürt and Sajószentpéter) which may be older (5600–5400 and 5400–5200 BCE respectively), but the dating methodology is less precise. Wells constructed of stone that date back to at least 6500 BCE have been found in northern modern Israel, one at the same site as one of the earliest megalith structures which spread across Europe with Neolithic people. Using stone in the Levant makes sense, but I imagine somewhere along the way Neolithic people probably also created wells of wood before arriving in central Europe.

[Flinn]

I bet a number of individuals emptied a wineskin and made it fart, then thought "how can we do that again, but make it sound worse?". It also gives the lie to Scots nationalists claiming kilts and bagpipes as their own.

Music belongs to the wind and I have never seen a song with a passport: at best they have temporary visas. IIRC Hava Nageila has a traditional Rumanian tune but what's Rumanian? As mentioned the Balkan traditions overlap like dropped spaghetti, and itinerant musicians (eg Jewish, Rom, Vlach) were all prominent in creation and dispersal. Likewise Rom, Jewish and North Africans in Iberia, the waves of Italian French and German music masters from the Early Modern to the 19th century, etc. and there's the complex of cultures feeding into modern popular music (eg African traditions meeting Hispanic and British and French to form Blues, Jazz etc). Jazz used to be played by black men in black brothels, now its played by white men in expensive clubs.

I've posted about Misrlou before, and the Don Dale connection is quite illustrative. He's a US citizen of Armenian descent playing a song first recorded in Athens by Constantinopolitan Hellenes in the Smyrnan dialect performed in a Levantine mode about an Egyptian girl, so what I'm saying is it's obviously Irish and I'll fight you.

Just going to leave this here in case some thinks I actually want to fight

Music, like food and fashion and national stereotypes are not naturally attached to some national territory. IIRC Polydore Virgil (a papal official in Tudor England) recorded that the English were all passionate and vain, giving to public kissing and flamboyant boasfulness, as opposed to the (then current) stereotype of reserved and tasteful Italians like himself: it amusing to see the reverse image of the 20th century truisms.

[Aexodus]

I can certainly see why many would find it offensive. There's nothing wrong with such criticism per se, but academic writing should strive to be impersonal and data-driven. Or in cases of political science, philosophy, and literary criticism, concise and logically constructed. Resorting to phrases like "disaster of postmodernism" isn't going to win you any points with either the mainstream academia nor with the conservative leaning academics who have their own reputations to protect. If one wants an example of how to behave and how not to behave in this regard, I would draw attention to the difference between Mankiw and Summers. Krugman is also a good example of how to polarize. All three are, obviously, excellent economists.

In regards to the topic of the thread. Ideally, policy should be designed and carried out at the high level, by data-driven people who had a multi-disciplinary education in economics, history, law, and politics, as well as their chosen field of expertise. By its nature, almost all American degrees are fairly well-rounded, softer hard sciences like Biochem, and Math will inevitably have space for electives. Far more than an Engineering or Physics majors. Softer sciences like Economics even more so. I would argue, that American bureaucracy, for the most part, achieves this goal. High level positions either demand years of experience "in the field" or a graduate degree. For the most part, I find most graduate students to be rather thoughtful, malleable, and capable of expressing opinions outside of their political overton window. That said, I also live in Seattle which, surprisingly, has a very good mix of progressives and conservatives. The issue isn't so much at the policy level but mostly in managerial roles. Directors managers, and HR and such are picked generally due to experience and qualification, rather than well-rounded expertise.

So if I were to make a suggestion on how to improve government. I'd argue for trimming down on middle management and being more selective with who gets in those positions. Many government departments in my state already do that, but seniority and unions make it difficult to rejuvenate an organization from bottom-up.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Race is based on phenotype, not directly on the genes. This is an important point I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoty...pe_distinction

If the mean black American IQ is (best estimate based on a century’s worth of data) around 85, as compared to a mean white American IQ of 100, then if IQ is normally distributed (which it is), you will see a far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQs 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation. Typically criminals with IQs below 70 cannot be executed in the USA, I believe.

That parsimoniously explains the greater diagnostic rates for blacks when it comes to “Intellectual disability”. It simply a consequence of the normal distribution of cognitive ability, because there are significant differences in the group means.

Precisely about this quote, there are several issues.

First of all, the mean American IQ for the 1900s was estimated around 70. Were they in average mentally disabled? No.

Over the past 100 years, Americans' mean IQ has been on a slow but steady climb. Between 1900 and 2012, it rose nearly 30 points, which means that the average person of 2012 had a higher IQ than 95 percent of the population had in 1900.
[...]
If you mean, on the other hand, something like: Were people just as adapted to their circumstances in 1900 as they are today? Well, of course they were. They were able to do factory work, to hunt. They could cope with the world as it existed then. They had an average IQ of 70, but they weren't all mentally retarded. So in that respect there's been no gain in intelligence.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter

Secondly, the time when the mean American IQ crossed 85 was around the 1940s. Were they inferior in some way? No.

The Flynn Effect should upend some of the smugness among those who have historically done well in global I.Q. standings. For example, while there is still a race gap, black Americans are catching up — and now do significantly better than white Americans of the "greatest generation" did in the 1940s…
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/o...art-world.html

Thirdly, the gap can be explained by other factors than simply genetics:

This finding has been reinforced by the changes in average IQ scores observed in some populations. The most rapid has been among Kenyan children – a rise of 26.3 points in the 14 years between 1984 and 1998, according to one study. The reason has nothing to do with genes. Instead, researchers found that, in the course of half a generation, nutrition, health and parental literacy had improved.

So, what about the Ashkenazis? Since the 2005 University of Utah paper was published, DNA research by other scientists has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are far less genetically isolated than the paper argued. On the claims that Ashkenazi diseases were caused by rapid natural selection, further research has shown that they were caused by a random mutation. And there is no evidence that those carrying the gene variants for these diseases are any more or less intelligent than the rest of the community.

But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”

In fact IQ is a great example of a trait that is highly heritable but not genetically determined. Recall that what makes toe number genetically determined is that having five toes is coded in and caused by the genes so as to develop in any normal environment. By contrast, IQ is enormously affected by normal environmental variation, and in ways that are not well understood. As Herrnstein and Murray concede, children from very low socio-economic status backgrounds who are adopted into high socio-economic status backgrounds have IQs dramatically higher than their parents. The point is underscored by what Herrnstein and Murray call the “Flynn Effect”: IQ has been rising about 3 points every 10 years worldwide. Since World War II, IQ in many countries has gone up 15 points, about the same as the gap separating Blacks and Whites in this country. And in some countries, the rise has been even more dramatic. For example, average IQ in Holland rose 21 points between 1952 and 1982.